Islamic Culture to Be Focus of Malloy Lecture

Artist Shirin Neshat will focus on issues of Islamic culture when she delivers this year’s Malloy Visiting Artist Lecture at Skidmore.

Free and open to the public, the talk is scheduled at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, April 18, in Gannett Auditorium of Palamoutain Hall. The illustrated lecture will incorporate slides and video to explore ideology and identity in post-revolutionary Iran.

Art in America writer Amei Wallach has written, “In a highly productive three-year period, Shirin Neshat has produced a series of stark, visually arresting films that reflect the tensions of Muslim society and her own conflicted role as an Iranian woman living in the West.”

Neshat’s films are rare in their ability to tell a particular story that conveys universal meaning. They do not contain dialogue; instead stories are told with poetic devices, with images, and with music. For Passage, her most recent video, Neshat collaborated with composer Phillip Glass. Belinda Luscombe, writing in Time magazine, notes, “It’s difficult to pin down exactly what makes Neshat’s videos so astonishing. Part of their freshness must be that they offer a view of life few Westerners understand, in a way that emphasizes its beauty and passion rather than its oppression. But her work is not simple reportage. The people in her videos are vehicles for expressing universal human emotions: desire, love, grief, loneliness.”

Neshat consistently has used architecture to articulate space. The artist transfers her 16mm and 35mm films to DVD and typically projects them in carefully designed spaces that engage the viewer on an emotional and physical level. In this way, she invites the viewer to become part of the work.

Born in Qazvin, Iran, in 1957, Neshat moved to the U.S. in 1974 and lives and works in New York City. Her recent solo exhibitions have included shows in Japan, Florence, Vienna, London, and Hamburg, as well as at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Skidmore’s Malloy Visiting Artist Lecture is made possible through the support of Susan Rabinowitz Malloy, a member of the Class of 1945 who is a philanthropist and a widely exhibited artist. The program brings contemporary artists of international stature to work closely with Skidmore art students, in addition to giving a lecture on their work.

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